speising wrote:even a fairy tale like SW ought to be internally consistent. if you pull a magic superweapon out of your ass after 2 hours of running away, you have to expect the audience to ask why you didn't do so earlier.

This exactly. Or why you didn't use that type of superweapon earlier. How many pilots and xwings did you lose attacking Starkiller base when you could have hyperspaced kamikazed an old freighter (or an asteroid) into the weak spot Finn told you about? Why did you lose ALL your bombers at the beginning of this movie, along with Xwings and Awings when you could have kamikazed the bombers themselves into the dreadnought. Those bombers are all hyperdrive equipped according to the Incredible Cross-Sections book, so it seems they would have been as useful as torpedoes instead of the slow ass bombing run they did.

How has no one mentioned the telepathic bond between Rey and Ben? That was by far my favourite part of the movie. Rey going back and forth between Luke and Kylo and her path she chose to take between them felt like a very fresh take on the force and the Jedi. I didn't care much about many of the characters this time around, but they did a damn fine job making me care about Rey.

There were cheesy moments, there were useless moments, but overall this movie was pretty great.

Those were some of my favorite parts as well. Unfortunately I disagree with you about the path Rey took - the movie ends with Rey firmly on the good side and Kylo on the evil side. Any nuance or grey areas that were presented initially have been completely discarded by the end of it. That is one of the big reasons I was so disappointed by it.

Liked/disliked it in roughly equal measure, with outliers to love/hate. Not much to add that hasn't already been said (or rebutted), but…

The eleventh word in on the star-scrolling prologue annoyed me (as did the four-dot ellipsis upon which it ended, that's how annoyed I'd gotten at that point), but I appreciated some of the humour (I rather enjoyed the steam iron bit), even if I thought it was overdone. As was the Split The Party plan, as noted.

Noting that I might have expected a somewhat corroded X-Wing to be seen, relating to a certain party's arrival, the whole salt-on-red-substrate thing (or frost on red-salty-substrate? Not exactly sure what the guy was refering to…) clearly and intentionally telegraphed the eventual conclusion to that little encounter. (Were they mining the red stuff? They left quite a lot of still there. Perhaps as a homage to the partially completed Death Star II internals. Really, throwing ships around in narrow spaces, without any obvious way of applying handbrakes if you find a dead end, seems to be SOP for some schools of flying…)

Was expecting the 'cryptographer' they got to have been displaying the same sign (but poorer quality), at some point, indicating the smart guy was not the one they needed. But we know how that ended up, so probably 'ok' but not actually the real deal promised by wossername. Production note: the cryptologist's dialogue was too slurred, for me, at some points. I'd have to turn subtitles on for some of what he said, in future watchings where I have that facility.

I grinned at the broom. A new organisation bootstrapped on nothing more than fairytales told to kids, by kids? (But, the ring, really? Not even in its trivially concealed configuration.)

Soupspoon wrote:Production note: the cryptologist's dialogue was too slurred, for me, at some points. I'd have to turn subtitles on for some of what he said, in future watchings where I have that facility.

speising wrote:even a fairy tale like SW ought to be internally consistent. if you pull a magic superweapon out of your ass after 2 hours of running away, you have to expect the audience to ask why you didn't do so earlier.

And it is internally consistent or at least as much as anything else in Star Wars.

bentheimmigrant wrote:

maybeagnostic wrote:there is no gravity in space

Unacceptable.

Ok, fine, not in the way that allows stuff to *fall* like that anyway

Zohar wrote:SDK:

Spoiler:

Those were some of my favorite parts as well. Unfortunately I disagree with you about the path Rey took - the movie ends with Rey firmly on the good side and Kylo on the evil side. Any nuance or grey areas that were presented initially have been completely discarded by the end of it.

I think that's just a side effect of the way these episodes are made- specifically a lot more like an Abrams-style TV show episode than the middle part of a coherent trilogy. One unfortunate side effect is that it really doesn't carry much thematic depth or nuance between episodes but, once again, Star Wars has always been rather inadequate in that respect.

maybeagnostic wrote:And it is internally consistent or at least as much as anything else in Star Wars.

But with regards to ramming it's not consistent at all. Why didn't they just use the other ships that ran out of fuel, to ram the enemy ships instead of just letting them slowly drift towards them, if ramming is a functional strategy? Especially when they saw that the First Order wasn't giving up on chasing them. I mean what was the plan for those other ships anyways? Why didn't they scuttle them to begin with and save the fuel?

maybeagnostic wrote:Ok, fine, not in the way that allows stuff to *fall* like that anyway

Still unacceptable. From memory, they were above a planet. If they weren't in orbit then yes, things do indeed fall in space. Now, maybe not in quite the direction you would like, but things are still gravitating.

maybeagnostic wrote:Ok, fine, not in the way that allows stuff to *fall* like that anyway

Still unacceptable. From memory, they were above a planet. If they weren't in orbit then yes, things do indeed fall in space. Now, maybe not in quite the direction you would like, but things are still gravitating.

They were pretty far from the planet. Anyways, the bombs are electromagnetically launched, not just dropped (why they were launched at such low speed I have no idea). They didn't do a good job of portraying that visually though.

Shrug. I loved it, but I accept that some of the criticisms are valid. All I can really say is that all I ask of my fantasy media is that I don't spot the plot holes at the time I'm watching it, and it passed that one. I sort-of liked TFA, but I haven't had such a buzz watching a SW film in a long time.

How can I think my way out of the problem when the problem is the way I think?

Chen wrote:I mean what was the plan for those other ships anyways? Why didn't they scuttle them to begin with and save the fuel?

"Support ships", was the in-film quote. The mightiest aircraft carrier without its accompanying fleet is a fractional resource of one with various tenders, aegis, etc. Not a resource to give up if they don't need to. And it seems they don't use (or trust) their pocket calculators enough to realise the inevitabilities of the scenario.

(But that first ship being a hospital ship, in a situation where casualties are almost entirely complete fatalities, is probably not that useful. It'd only be useful at the end of a journey when its large quantity of equipment can be used to R&R the 'walking wounded'. Yet we saw at least three major characters treated for variously serious medical issues upon the main vessel. It may only be quantitatively better care rather than qualitative, that they are dragging along.)

Also, captains going down with their (unpowered) ships? What is this, Farscapian Leviathon/Pilot interdependencies?

Charitably, though, the more they keep the pursuers thinking that they have no plan other to senselessly keep running, the more they disguise fheir intention to go off-piste. (If it were I, though, I would make it look like the Big Ship was in for the long haul. Maybe have it make One Last Jump1 to really draw them off (and, with the pursuers actively pursuing, prevent the much under-used Mark I Eyeball systems from observing the clearly visible sensor-cloaked ships!) to lay a more time-wasting false trail.

Or the entire Film Logic was just as sensible as the various "too good to be shot, let us spend some unnecessary time being extravagant in our method of execution, after all, we have have plenty of time and… *argh*!". With surely non-accidental overtones of ISIS along the way, in one case. (And, in another case "Just shoot him" was the wrong option, but perhaps forgivably so.)

1 Speaking of which, I thought at one point it might be Finn who was at the end of the String. A First Order implant missed by everyone. Might have been an interesting plot-point, especially if everyone was trying to atop him from Escape Podding, when doing so was the answer to their (everybody else's!) problems.

maybeagnostic wrote:And it is internally consistent or at least as much as anything else in Star Wars.

But with regards to ramming it's not consistent at all. Why didn't they just use the other ships that ran out of fuel, to ram the enemy ships instead of just letting them slowly drift towards them, if ramming is a functional strategy?

Because the First Order would have either shot them to bits or avoided them. Again the ramming in the final scene only worked because the First Order specifically ignored the ship turning towards them and preparing for light speed.

bentheimmigrant wrote:

maybeagnostic wrote:Ok, fine, not in the way that allows stuff to *fall* like that anyway

Still unacceptable. From memory, they were above a planet. If they weren't in orbit then yes, things do indeed fall in space. Now, maybe not in quite the direction you would like, but things are still gravitating.

They were nowhere near a planet or star and things don't fall in space, they fall towards something. In this case they fell towards the First Order ship which is many orders of magnitude too small to cause a gravitational attraction of this magnitude and regardless what genius decided to make space bombers *drop* stuff.

Chen wrote:Anyways, the bombs are electromagnetically launched, not just dropped (why they were launched at such low speed I have no idea). They didn't do a good job of portraying that visually though.

That's what I assumed but there was no reason to launch them at such an inconvenient angle or such a low velocity. In fact we know that the Rebellion has guided torpedos or at least did in ANH and then promptly forgot about them.

Anyway, the bomber scene didn't really bother me and neither did the ramming scene. They were both about equally well set up (which is to say I got the idea but thought they could've been done better) and operated on the same logic- roughly WW II-era naval engagement. If you think about it that way, the technology in the whole series makes more sense- ramming isn't some genius tactical move, it's an antiquated desperate gamble that only worked because the First Order chose to ignore Holdo; the initial assault was inspired by a B-52 assault on a heavily fortified location; Jyn Erso's team had to physically carry out the plans from the Empire base because they have radio but no internet or digital files; instantaneous interplanetary hologram communication has static because old radios do; the Empire assaults a rebel base with AT-ATs (tanks) and infantry instead of blasting it from space because ships can't really attack positions too far from the sea; and so on.

Chen wrote:Anyways, the bombs are electromagnetically launched, not just dropped (why they were launched at such low speed I have no idea). They didn't do a good job of portraying that visually though.

That's what I assumed but there was no reason to launch them at such an inconvenient angle or such a low velocity.

SFAICT, the bombs were 'dropped' through the internal artificial gravity field1.

My hypothesis is that the dreadnought shielding is capable of intercepting energetic attacks (laser/plasma bolts, thruster-powered, etc) down upon the main hull2, requiring energy-neutral delivery upon the weak-spot (either equivalent to a magazine shaft on a seaborne dreadnought, or perhaps the ubiquitous exhaust-vent required for operation of such weaponry). One assumes that micrometeoroid-shields operate at a distance beyond this attack run, or are only actively activated as needed (Po surprised them, and zoomed straight in there until the point that only turrets (and localised fighters) bothered him, whilst he could only really bother those elements in return).

Anyway, having somehow managed to neutralise (most of, but still unsufficiently) the defences usable against the bombers, they 'pop up' (again, probably failures of Mk I Eyeball resources) to come over and 'launch' (drop and drift) their many dozens of easter-eggs onto the target. It obviously works (after a fashion), and the real problem is working out why other things don't…

1 The same one that the sole release button handset fell through - ignoring the possibility that there could be various backup, if not primary, controls for all bombing functions by the pilot's seat. No pilot, no aiming, so regardless of how disabled/busy the rest of the crew are, even if the pilot doesn't have the Bomb Aiming hardware available to the bombadier (why not a mirrored display, a la Luke's team's Trench Run?), it's worth a fail-safed (or, once armed, fail-less-dangerously) extension to the release trigger.

2 Another reason the turrets weren't protected from the initial attaxk. They rely upon energy transfer and PWMing the local sector of shield - somewhat like a Fokker Synchronisation through-propeller machinegun setup but in a reverse dependency - might make it hard to deal with the wild fluctuation of shielding power needs. So they poke up through the energy shielding. I recokon the big guns, below, are shot through an apature (partially temporal, partially localised) in the shield, because their rate (multishot aside) is relatively low and instantaneous power demands already highly intense.

Soupspoon wrote:↶1 Speaking of which, I thought at one point it might be Finn who was at the end of the String. A First Order implant missed by everyone. Might have been an interesting plot-point, especially if everyone was trying to atop him from Escape Podding, when doing so was the answer to their (everybody else's!) problems.

I didn't have that, but I did also assume there was a specific thing that was at the end of the string. I assumed it was the Rey-beacon. IIRC the scenes introducing both were cut pretty close together, I also think this works better than just "they've developed active tracking tech" because they've got a specific in, I also don't think it'd stop any of the rest of the plot.

Small problem: big ships. What’s the point if you don’t bring out enough tie-fighters to protect them? Why would you build big, slow ships... and what’s with the big guns on top? What if they’re under you? Why are all the ships coordinated to be facing up? Why don’t we ever see sideways ships? Or upside down ships? Space is pretty 3 dimensional, more so withought gravity, how come all our space battles are always X & Y but no Z?Ships in space continually accelerate, so why were the bombers so slow? I feel like in space, small, fast fighters would work best.

Big problem: I understand when the ships lost fuel, it couldn’t keep accelerating to stay out of range of the gaint ships. But that one medical cruiser FELL BACKWARDS. IT TWISTED AS IF FALLING!!!! Why?!?! All it did was look cool and make me cringe... I can understand why they didn’t kammikazee that one ship, it would have blown them to pieces first. But all those other times?

SW really is too much fantasy now. If anyone asks me how something was possible, why the rebellion never did that before, and how in the world people in SW use their weird touch screens... the answer is magic. Pure magic.

My meta for future reference

Spoiler:

cemper93 wrote:Your meta appears to be "just writes whatever is on his mind and doesn't remember what happened more than five hours ago"

Also, a lot of them go into atmospheres, so not looking like a drunk chimney has advantages.

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking.

eSOANEM wrote:I assumed it was the Rey-beacon. IIRC the scenes introducing both were cut pretty close together,

It was described as "binary" (which I interpreted as paired in a Quantum way that brooked no additional pair(/triple+)-locking) and packaged small enough (with presumed bells-and-whistles limited-bandwidth messaging interface that might have been the bulk of the overt device, but unnecessary in the context of the link itself) that a small implant (cranial, abdominal cavity, etc; your choice1) could have been Finn's end of the link.

Rather squished as a theory when it turns out that a giant Flux Capacitor was the opoosite end of the equation2, and all that 'promises'… Confirmed when Finn actually separated off on the cul-de-sac mission and nobody on the enemy bridge bothered to note that the players had Split The Party3. Which, given the Hidden Plan by the disposable Vice Admiral6, would have been awkward. If anybody had the gumption to report such discrepencies up the chain of command, and risk the wrath of Phasma or Hux (especially of toadying Hux who likely trickles-down the exasperation he gets laid upon him by his current boss) for entirely the opposite reason to what the end result often reveals.

Re: Ship-shapes. I don't always agree with the design choices (noting the simianesque 'knuckles' on the front legs of the FO AT-ATs, which I didn't see a purpose for - maybe better purchase outside of perfectly flat terrain and or a measure against speeder-grapple-cable-tripping, but we never saw them have to do any of that, which was a lost opportunity!) but I do admire the interweaving and continuation/back-formation aspects of the ship/vehicle designs that the extrapolated forward (and, for the prequels, backwards) from the OT. And I thought X-Wing configuration changes (referencing something read earlier, maybe in this thread) was something to do with altering shield/hyperspace-field configuration according to wing geometry (minimally changed as it actually is), much like the NCC-74656 does (for 'environmental' reasons) over in that other universe, rather than to allow atmospheric flight, as per the Thunderbolt version of the Starfury in that other other universe.

1 But handily (yet still initially overlooked) subdermal that, once detected, allowed it to be painfully removed with a hot knife 'in the field' would have been useful (if predictable) to the plot. The removed grain or sliver thence quickly slipped onto Phasma's own armour/transport-ship just in time to ensure that some sort of inexorable homing-torpedo-mega-destructo-ship-thing released by the Order does a Marco Ramius on whatever FO mothership Phasma is currently stationed on. Obvious, so maybe I would have complained, but who knows…?

2 A second newly-revealed technology, seemingly something like a phased-array radar-lockon device that has look-through-hyperspace abilities, capable of maintaining the lock. But conveniently has an external polling cycle to wherever it reports its fndings that only demands a low bandwidth comms line with no intermediate possibility of communicating "signal lost" mid-cycle, etc. Ready for another ship to suddenly realise that it can turn on its Giant Flux Capacitor, when it hasn't done so already.

3 Though the assigned console operator probably would have just used Repair Manoeuvre Number One4+5, if trained in the same class as the Shield Console Operator.)

4 Hit the console! People who aren't IT professionals tend to hit screens. People who are IT professionals often know exactly where on the computer case (a.k.a. 'CPU', to the first group of people) one should actually slap your hand to correct the annoying fan resonance noise/whatever, and thus earn themselves the same sort of respect as Scotty does of Kirk, from that first lot. Temporarily. All-too-fleetingly. Forgotten again by lunch.

5 Not to be confused with Repair Manoeuvre Number Two (by one standard, anyway), which can be more easily initiated remotely through symbolic instruction to the localised error-reporting bio-interface unit (tell the user to do it for you!). RM#2 is power-cycling the equipment in the vague hope that this deals with the issue. But it buys time while you head for the stairwell/book the flight to actually visit the user and find that there's actually nothing wrong except for the eternal PEBCAK issue.

6 A tragically missed opportunity for Fisher to have gotten her character's CMOA. General Organa could have done everything that Hodor Holdo did (using her experiences just before the hypothetical change of command and her attitude in demoting Po to further justify her standoffish attitude) and done the job. Which would also have worked (better?) if the handwavey-tracking Giant Flux Capacitor was keyed into her, somehow, , rather than the (still presumed!) ship. And Finn's infiltration had discovered this rather disturbing fact in the very act of not-quite-disabling the device.

((Do you think Disney needs scriptwriters? Sorry, that's a stupid question. Of course they do. But do they want them? I reckon I could help them out. A lot! And I'd welcome many of you as colleagues, too, of course. So long as I'm in charge.))

Small problem: big ships. What’s the point if you don’t bring out enough tie-fighters to protect them? Why would you build big, slow ships... and what’s with the big guns on top? What if they’re under you? Why are all the ships coordinated to be facing up? Why don’t we ever see sideways ships? Or upside down ships? Space is pretty 3 dimensional, more so withought gravity, how come all our space battles are always X & Y but no Z?Ships in space continually accelerate, so why were the bombers so slow? I feel like in space, small, fast fighters would work best.

Big problem: I understand when the ships lost fuel, it couldn’t keep accelerating to stay out of range of the gaint ships. But that one medical cruiser FELL BACKWARDS. IT TWISTED AS IF FALLING!!!! Why?!?! All it did was look cool and make me cringe... I can understand why they didn’t kammikazee that one ship, it would have blown them to pieces first. But all those other times?

SW really is too much fantasy now. If anyone asks me how something was possible, why the rebellion never did that before, and how in the world people in SW use their weird touch screens... the answer is magic. Pure magic.

(emphasis mine)

The now is unnecessary. Star Wars has always done pretty much all of this and has certainly always been a fantasy story in space rather than a proper sci-fi story.

eSOANEM wrote:I assumed it was the Rey-beacon. IIRC the scenes introducing both were cut pretty close together,

It was described as "binary" (which I interpreted as paired in a Quantum way that brooked no additional pair(/triple+)-locking) and packaged small enough (with presumed bells-and-whistles limited-bandwidth messaging interface that might have been the bulk of the overt device, but unnecessary in the context of the link itself) that a small implant (cranial, abdominal cavity, etc; your choice1) could have been Finn's end of the link.

Rather squished as a theory when it turns out that a giant Flux Capacitor was the opoosite end of the equation2, and all that 'promises'… Confirmed when Finn actually separated off on the cul-de-sac mission and nobody on the enemy bridge bothered to note that the players had Split The Party3. Which, given the Hidden Plan by the disposable Vice Admiral6, would have been awkward. If anybody had the gumption to report such discrepencies up the chain of command, and risk the wrath of Phasma or Hux (especially of toadying Hux who likely trickles-down the exasperation he gets laid upon him by his current boss) for entirely the opposite reason to what the end result often reveals.

Ah yeah, that probably was what they meant by binary; I just assumed it meant digital (but sounding more technobabbly).

You're not entirely fair on the flux capacitor-thing though. It wasn't the tracker itself, it was a circuit breaker for the scanner.

Peaceful Whale wrote:SW really is too much fantasy now. If anyone asks me how something was possible, why the rebellion never did that before, and how in the world people in SW use their weird touch screens... the answer is magic. Pure magic.

Space Wizards with Laser Swords were a fundamental part of the Star Wars universe since day 1. It's been Space Fantasy all along.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

I'm still racking my brains for an in-universe instance of the term laser sword being used for a lightsabre, like Luke does this time round. I think his dad did, in Phantom Menace, but that was when he was a little kid with a patchy knowledge of what he was boldly refering to. I'm sure even Han only went so far as to deride hokey religions and 'ancient weapons' as no match for a blaster.

It seems to me, then, that Luke is delinerately dredging deep for this self-deprecation (and of all that Rey thinks he represents) to codeswitch to a term even a stuck-up half-witted n***h****r wouldn't stoop to.

Soupspoon wrote:I'm still racking my brains for an in-universe instance of the term laser sword being used for a lightsabre, like Luke does this time round. I think his dad did, in Phantom Menace, but that was when he was a little kid with a patchy knowledge of what he was boldly refering to. I'm sure even Han only went so far as to deride hokey religions and 'ancient weapons' as no match for a blaster.

It seems to me, then, that Luke is delinerately dredging deep for this self-deprecation (and of all that Rey thinks he represents) to codeswitch to a term even a stuck-up half-witted n***h****r wouldn't stoop to.

It struck me as another wink-wink to dyed-in-the-midichlorians fans.

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking.

eSOANEM wrote:The now is unnecessary. Star Wars has always done pretty much all of this and has certainly always been a fantasy story in space rather than a proper sci-fi story.

Yeah this. For gods sake you have people manually piloting fighters and turrets shooting at craft going through space. Which means they are ridiculously close to one another AND going ridiculously slowly for what space combat would actually be. That's always been the case in Star Wars movies, even forgetting the magical space wizards and their swords.

eSOANEM wrote:The now is unnecessary. Star Wars has always done pretty much all of this and has certainly always been a fantasy story in space rather than a proper sci-fi story.

Yeah this. For gods sake you have people manually piloting fighters and turrets shooting at craft going through space. Which means they are ridiculously close to one another AND going ridiculously slowly for what space combat would actually be. That's always been the case in Star Wars movies, even forgetting the magical space wizards and their swords.

Most sci-fi has this though, Babylon 5, Space Above and Beyond, Farscape, Star Trek.. When it comes to 'magical space-combat' that doesn't work using actual orbital mechanics Star Wars isn't particularly exceptional in that regard...

Spoiler:

... Okay, Episode 8's "Space Bombers" take a good stab at crossing that line.

Hell the vast majority of games set in space are at least as ridiculous (I'm looking at -you- Sins of a Solar Empire).

But that's not really surprising, most people haven't had the opportunity to get their heads wrapped around orbital mechanics, and unless you have some idea how things move in orbits, orbital mechanics are a weird way to move around. If you're trying to tell a story set in the future odds are a dissertation on orbital mechanics is not really germane to the plot, so a more terrestrially-familiar environment (naval with fighters) helps the audience follow along where actual-space movement might lose them.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking.

Dauric wrote:But that's not really surprising, most people haven't had the opportunity to get their heads wrapped around orbital mechanics, and unless you have some idea how things move in orbits, orbital mechanics are a weird way to move around. If you're trying to tell a story set in the future odds are a dissertation on orbital mechanics is not really germane to the plot, so a more terrestrially-familiar environment (naval with fighters) helps the audience follow along where actual-space movement might lose them.

That's fine up to a point but I have an issue with this way of looking at things when you are trying to tell an actual sci-fi story. Star Wars doesn't and very few people think it does but actual interesting stories about space really should. It doesn't even have to be super accurate or detailed but if you look at something like The Expanse they manage to keep the simple and understandable "two powerful nations with big navies and small poor colonies far off" dynamic while taking into account everything from orbital dynamics and g-forces to the relation between social policy and the environment.

Having just seen for sale a Star Wars 'infinity mirror' light (half-silvered front glass, with "Star Wars" title, point lighting round edges and full-silvered back mirror, creating receding and fading recursions of reflections of lighting and logo), I reallythink they'll miss a trick if they don't do a Rey-edition version. You know what I mean.

Perhaps use an optional lenticular printing technique for the inward-facing image to subtly change, per (composited, multiply internally-reflected) angle of iteration. At the very least, it'd make your eyes go funny(/ier).

I watched it again since it's on Netflix now. I still kinda like it. I think I'm more at peace now with what this new trilogy is doing to the franchise.

I heard someone say that they liked the new Star Wars movies, they thought they were well done and enjoyable in themselves, And they're killing Star Wars. And I think I'm ok with that. I'd rather see Star Wars killed in this way, so that something new(and I'll say it, better), can grow up in its place, than to see the zombified corpse of the original Star Wars paraded on screen for the rest of eternity.

Unless studio interference fucks things up (which admittedly seems more likely given the fallout from Solo), I predict that Episode IX will do something truly unexpected, and I expect to enjoy every minute of it.

Other thoughts:

Spoiler:

I counted the rebel escape shuttles getting blown up. When the First Order officer first calls out that they spotted the shuttles, he says there's 30 of them. We see 19 explosions on screen, well, a couple of them happen off screen, but we get lights/sound effects. If you try this yourself, be careful not to double-count any of the off-screen explosions, there's lights/sound from the cannon firing preceding many of the shuttle explosions. I thought about timing gap between shots and trying to figure out how many shots could have been fired during scenes where we can't see or hear the shuttles being destroyed, but there are a few clear shots of the cannon fire missing completely. It might be possible to put an upper bound on the cannon's accuracy and estimate, but that's more time and math than I'm willing to dedicate to this effort. Also, it's clear that many of the scenes happening while this is going on are happening simultaneously, and the shuttles are visibly being destroyed in at least two of them, not including the wide shots that show the whole chase, so we may be seeing the same explosions multiples times. Speaking of those wide shots, in one of them that happens during the middle-ish of the chase, I counted somewhere between nine and eleven remaining shuttles. In the last shot of the shuttles escaping as Holdo rams the flagship there are only six. On re-watching, I felt this whole sequence fit better than I remember it seeming to in the theater, and likewise the whole Casino World diversion seemed to take up a lot less screen time than I remembered. The final chase sequence also seemed a lot more tense when I was counting the explosions. That's not to excuse anything or anything, I still think the whole chase was the weakest part of the movie and could have easily been trimmed without the movie losing much.

Roosevelt wrote:

I wrote:Does Space Teddy Roosevelt wrestle Space Bears and fight the Space Spanish-American War with his band of Space-volunteers the Space Rough Riders?